The Crux

Understanding the processes which drive biodiversity worldwide is never more crucial than now, in a world where biodiversity is shrinking rapidly. Biogeography, the study of species distributions, has come a long way, but there are still a lot of problems that need solving, including improving our understanding of the interactions between factors like climate change, dispersal abilities, fragmentation and species competition, to name a few.

This paper attempted to analyse some of the effects of those factors in concert, by producing a simulation of the evolutionary process in the world’s most biologically diverse continent, South America.

The Crux

Adaptive radiation is a fascinating ecological concept, one with which anyone who knows the tale of Darwin’s finches will be familiar with. The basic premise is that an organism may evolve different forms (and ultimately become different species) in response to pressures exerted upon them.

But whilst this may have been observed in many vertebrates, it’s often overlooked in parasites, whereby host defenses can prompt divergence in parasite morphology. Today’s paper wanted to test the two basic concepts of evolution. 1) Can host defenses prompt physical changes in parasites? 2) Are these changes heritable?